Strange
Bedfellows

Early this summer, as
Washington fretted about Iran's nuclear program, supporters of Mujahedin-e
Khalq, an Iranian opposition group, held a rally in an auditorium two blocks
from the White House. Prominent members of Congress addressed the crowd, as
did the State Department's recently retired ambassador-at-large for war
crimes.

Mujahedin-e Khalq, known as
MEK, is Iran's largest exile opposition group and, say its supporters, the
best hope of bringing democracy to Iran. It reaches into Iran through its
own satellite TV channel and claims an underground network of activists
inside the Islamic republic. It also has a big presence in neighboring Iraq,
where U.S. soldiers watch over more than 3,000 MEK members gathered in a
sprawling camp north of Baghdad.

The MEK, however, has a big
handicap: The U.S. government says it's a terrorist organization. Officials
cite its role in the murder of Americans in the 1970s and subsequent terror
attacks that killed hundreds of Iranians. Another big blemish is the group's
long collaboration with Saddam Hussein. On top of all that, former members
describe the MEK as a personality cult obsessed with celibacy and martyrdom.

So how does an outlaw
organization with a bloodstained past, a history of intimacy with Iraq's
toppled despot and a reputation for oddness generate thunderous applause
almost within earshot of the Oval Office?

Part of the answer lies in
subterfuge: Mujahedin-e Khalq, which means People's Holy Warriors, has a
raft of support groups with innocuous names, such as the National Convention
for a Democratic, Secular Republic in Iran, the host of the Washington
event. These haven't been banned and disavow violence.

More important in blurring
the MEK's status, however, is the muddle surrounding U.S. policy toward
Iran. With the U.S. armed forces bogged down in Iraq and America's military
options against neighboring Iran severely limited, the MEK and its fans are
lobbying hard to present the group as an ally that can help curb Tehran's
growing influence. These supporters, who include lawmakers and conservative
foreign-policy analysts, insist the MEK has no links to terrorism.

Most U.S. officials scoff at
forming any alliance with the MEK and dispute its claims of having a mass
following in Iran, stressing that many Iranians despise the organization. A
senior White House official says the Bush administration continues to view
the MEK as a terrorist organization and "not an advocate for democracy or
human rights" in Iran.

But some Iran analysts say
the MEK's thinly disguised presence in the U.S. makes a mockery of the
administration's antiterrorism campaign. The White House accuses Iran of
supporting terrorist groups, they say, yet turns a blind eye toward the MEK.
"It gives the impression that some terrorist organizations are better than
others," says Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American
Council, an Iranian-American civic organization.

Charm Offensive

Leading the push to get the
MEK's "terrorist" tag removed, with help from some members of Congress, is
an outfit called the Iran Policy Committee. The committee's president,
Raymond Tanter, a former National Security Council official under President
Reagan, says the MEK's designation is "restraining" the organization's
ability to promote democratic change in Iran. His group recently published a
glossy book that challenges the terrorism charges made against the MEK, and
this month helped host an event on Capitol Hill arguing the same point.

The charm offensive has taken
the MEK far from its origins. First set up in 1965 by vaguely Islamic
left-wing intellectuals in Tehran, Mujahedin-e Khalq used to curse American
"imperialism" and murdered a string of U.S. military personnel and defense
contractors in the 1970s, says the State Department. The group blames the
attacks on rogue Marxist factions and says they were not endorsed by MEK's
leaders, who were in jail at the time or had been executed.

Shortly before Iran's 1979
Islamic revolution, the Shah's crumbling America-backed regime released
jailed MEK activists. One of them, Massoud Rajavi, a former law student at
Tehran University, became the group's paramount leader and allied with
Islamist forces to topple the Shah. But the group quickly split with Iran's
new clerical rulers led by Ayatollah Khomeini, who executed thousands of MEK
supporters. The MEK retaliated with a wave of terror of its own.

Mr. Rajavi fled to France,
where his brother, a doctor, has a house in Auvers-sur-Oise, a sleepy town
outside Paris. To rally Iranians to his cause, Mr. Rajavi sent Massoud
Khodabandeh, a British-educated electrical engineer, to Iran's Kurdish
region to set up a radio transmitter. He began to broadcast taped tirades
against Ayatollah Khomeini.

In France, the group swiftly
fell prey to political and romantic bickering. Mr. Rajavi, who had just
divorced his second wife, shocked supporters by taking up with the wife of a
close friend and fellow MEK activist. They married and she took the name
Maryam Rajavi.

Another contentious liaison
followed. Mr. Rajavi moved to Iraq in 1986 with his new wife and forged an
alliance with Saddam Hussein, then at war with Iran. Former MEK members say
the Iraq dictator provided a six-story office building in Baghdad and
military bases, including Camp Ashraf, named in honor of Mr. Rajavi's first
wife, who had been killed in Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini's regime.

After a disastrous lunge into
Iran in 1988, the MEK embarked on a more successful military venture. It
helped Saddam Hussein crush an uprising by Kurds after Iraq's defeat by U.S.
forces during the 1991 Gulf War, according to U.S. diplomats and the State
Department's 2005 Country Reports on Terrorism.

Increasingly seen in the West
as an Iraqi stooge, Mr. Rajavi sent Ms. Rajavi back to France to drum up
support. Her campaign made some headway but foundered when the U.S. and
Europe began looking for ways to reach out to Iran's newly elected reformist
president, Mohammad Khatami.

Senior diplomats in the
Clinton administration say the MEK figured prominently as a bargaining chip
in a bridge-building effort with Tehran. Washington hoped it could get Iran
to back a Middle East peace initiative, stop funding terrorist groups and
forswear nuclear weapons. Iran, for its part, wanted the U.S. to take a hard
line against the MEK.

In 1997, the State Department
added the MEK to a list of global terrorist organizations as "a signal" of
the U.S.'s desire for rapprochement with Tehran's reformists, says Martin
Indyk, who at the time was assistant secretary of state for Near East
Affairs. President Khatami's government "considered it a pretty big deal,"
Mr. Indyk says.

The MEK also got hit by a
string of defections. Among those to quit was Mr. Khodabandeh, the
electrical engineer. He married another defector, Anne Singleton, an English
woman who had visited Camp Ashraf, where she says she was taught an
anti-imperialist song that vowed "death to America." Ms. Singleton wrote a
book denouncing the MEK as a crazed cult of enforced celibacy and brutal
discipline.

Other former members describe
a good cause warped by methods reminiscent of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural
Revolution -- a constant hunt for internal enemies, ideological "cleansing"
sessions and harsh punishment of real or imagined dissent. Mohsen Abbasloo,
a 28-year-old former MEK activist, says he was jailed and beaten at Camp
Ashraf for over a month after he voiced mild doubts. "I went there full of
hope but it was not even 1% of what I expected," says Mr. Abbasloo, who says
he spent four years at the huge desert complex of barracks, office buildings
and military training grounds between Baghdad and Iraq's border with Iran.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, a
veteran MEK member and chief foreign-affairs official of its political arm,
denies accusations of brutality and describes defectors as "tools of the
Iranian regime."

Throughout the 1990s, the MEK
continued to operate in Washington and elsewhere through various front
organizations, the most prominent of which was the Paris-based National
Council of Resistance of Iran. In 1999, the State Department banned the NCRI
on the grounds that it is the MEK's official political arm. The NCRI
describes itself as an Iranian parliament-in-exile comprising 530 members
and not just representing the MEK.

Its former U.S.-based
spokesman, Alireza Jafarzadeh, remained a regular on the Washington lobbying
and policy circuits. In recent years he appeared routinely on Fox News as a
foreign-affairs analyst. In 2002, he held a Washington news conference to
reveal a secret uranium enrichment facility in the Iranian city of Natanz.
The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna later confirmed the claim.
President Bush and other senior U.S. officials publicly praised what they
called an Iranian "dissident group" for unearthing the information.

Former MEK members and some
U.S. officials say they believe the Natanz information was fed to the MEK by
Israel, which wanted to make it public. The MEK derides this as nonsense.

In 2002, 150 members of the
House of Representatives signed a petition seeking the MEK's removal from
the U.S. government's terrorist list.

As America geared up for war
with Iraq in early 2003, the MEK muted its adulation of Saddam Hussein, say
people who were in Ashraf at the time. Top leaders, including the Rajavi
couple, quietly bailed from Camp Ashraf.

"We suddenly noticed that a
lot of senior people were missing," says Behzad Alishahi, an Iranian who
spent more than 15 years at the camp working as an MEK TV presenter. Just
before the U.S. invaded in March, he says, hundreds of MEK fighters rushed
toward the Iraq-Iran border for an attack on Iran. They turned back, he
says, after U.S. planes bombed their convoy and Camp Ashraf.

Ms. Rajavi fled to the
group's compound in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. Her husband vanished, along
with his hairdresser and bodyguards. This stirred rumors that he had been
picked up by the U.S. military and was providing intelligence about Saddam
Hussein and also Iran.

A State Department official
says Mr. Rajavi was last seen in Baghdad in March 2003 and is now either
dead or in hiding. The MEK says he's alive and evading Iranian assassins.

When American troops pulled
up outside Camp Ashraf shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, the
MEK offered no resistance and later agreed to disarm. Mr. Alishahi says he
and colleagues at the TV station were ordered by MEK commanders to destroy
film and other evidence of close ties to Saddam Hussein.

U.S. officials launched a
review of camp residents to decide if they should be prosecuted for
terrorism. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency warned French
authorities to watch out for the MEK. The French dispatched hundreds of
police to storm the MEK's Auvers-sur-Oise compound. They arrested Maryam
Rajavi and carted away $9 million in cash and documents detailing bank
accounts in France, the U.S. and elsewhere holding tens of millions of
dollars.

Also confiscated, says a
senior French security official, were videos of Mr. Rajavi meeting Saddam
Hussein and 99 satellite-positioning devices programmed with coordinates for
Iran. The French also found what they say were signs that the Iraqi dictator
had bankrolled the organization, something the MEK has always denied. These
included stacks of dollar bills wrapped in Iraqi newspapers and documents
relating to a gift of Iraqi oil, say French officials who were involved.

Drawing Criticism

The raid drew criticism from
lawmakers and others in France and also the U.S. About 10 MEK members set
themselves on fire in Europe and Canada in protest. Two died from their
burns. French police released Ms. Rajavi but launched a formal
terrorism-conspiracy investigation of her and 16 others.

Mr. Mohaddessin, the group's
foreign-affairs spokesman, who was also detained and later released,
ridicules the raid as a publicity stunt to win favor with Iran. There were
enough police, he says, "for a coup in an African country."

The U.S. review of Camp
Ashraf, which began around the same time as the French raid and finished in
summer 2004, partially vindicated the MEK. Only one person has faced any
U.S. charges, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Iran who was arrested in
September in New York for allegedly providing support to a terrorist group.
The roughly 3,300 now still in Ashraf were given the status of "protected
persons" under the Geneva Convention, which promises humane treatment for
nonnationals in a country at war. The U.S. military, as the occupying power,
took on the role of protector. A White House official says this "protected"
status applies only to individuals, not to the MEK as an organization.

Former Ashraf residents say
MEK commanders, most of whom are women, have worked hard to woo the American
soldiers who are now nominally in charge, inviting them to use a big
swimming pool and serving them pizza. American forces have, under an
agreement with the MEK, confiscated the group's roughly 300 tanks, 250
armored personnel carriers, 250 artillery pieces and 10,000 small arms. They
also blew up most of the MEK's ammunition. But Camp Ashraf still functions
as a bastion of opposition to Iran, shielded from the turmoil elsewhere in
Iraq by American soldiers.

In June, the MEK camp hosted
a mass rally of Iranian dissidents and thousands of Iraqis. Ms. Rajavi sent
a message from France urging them to "cut off the tentacles of the Iranian
regime." The MEK's satellite TV station, meanwhile, pumps out adulatory
propaganda for Ms. Rajavi and her missing husband, Massoud.

Both the Pentagon and the
U.S. Central Command declined to comment on the military's dealings with the
MEK in Iraq. But individual officers have expressed support for the MEK. In
May 2003, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, then-commander of America's 4th
Infantry Division, commended MEK members at Camp Ashraf for their
cooperation and told reporters that "this should lead to a review of whether
they are still a terrorist organization."

In 2005, following a report
by Human Rights Watch detailing torture and other abuses at MEK camps in
Iraq before the U.S. invasion, the commander of a U.S. military police unit
that had been stationed at Camp Ashraf wrote to the U.S.-based human-rights
group to defend the MEK. He said U.S. forces had not found "any credible
evidence" of any such abuses and said he would "like my own daughter to
someday visit these units for the cultural exchange."

In Washington, debate raged
during this time over how to deal with the MEK, say current and former U.S.
officials. Amid the screening of Ashraf residents, some in the Pentagon
pushed to use the MEK as a tool against Iran and Iranian-backed militants
operating inside Iraq, say current and former State Department officials
involved in Iraq policy.

Colin Powell, who was then
secretary of state, pushed back against the idea of cooperating with the
MEK, say current and former officials. Mr. Powell and his underlings argued
that any flirtation with the MEK would undermine Washington's stand against
terrorism. The State Department then designated the group's previously
tolerated U.S. affiliate, NCRI-U.S., as a terrorist front for the MEK. In
August 2003, the Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down its offices at
the National Press Club in Washington.

"There was this kind of
language [being offered by Pentagon officials] that one man's terrorist was
another man's freedom fighter," says Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Mr.
Powell's chief of staff at the time. He says the State Department pushed
through 2003 and 2004 for the MEK's disarmament.

Douglas Feith, who served as
the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian official until last year, denies any desire by
the Pentagon to cozy up to the MEK. "The idea that we would use them against
Iran is fantasy," he says.

MEK leaders sheltering in the
West are now ramping up a campaign, along with their American and European
fans, to present Maryam Rajavi and her missing husband as the only way to
stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. This summer, thousands of their
supporters gathered in a Paris convention hall. Ms. Rajavi arrived in a
chauffeured Bentley, stepping onto a red carpet to the sound of trumpets.
Rose petals were strewn at her feet. A former French prime minister and
other VIPs applauded.

Among the MEK's Washington
supporters are a significant mix of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who chairs the International
Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, drafted
legislation this year that would require the White House to provide funding
to Iran's largest opposition groups, although the bill doesn't explicitly
name the MEK.

Mr. Abbasloo, the former Camp
Ashraf resident, who is now in Europe, says he doesn't like Iran's current
regime but mocks the MEK as an alternative. "This would only replace a snake
with a crocodile," he says. "I hope America is not going to be that stupid."